Sexual assault activist: Baylor should cancel season; why does staff defend Briles after he threw them under bus?

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Baylor fan Jon McClellan of Houston, purchases several shirts from Celsa Hurley of Hurley's Graphics which have the word #CAB on printed on them, before an NCAA college football game against TCU on Saturday, Nov. 5, 2016, in Waco, Texas. The #CAB stands for Coach Art Briles, Baylor's former football head coach. (AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez)

The story of Baylor's 62-22 loss to TCU on Saturday was not about what happened on the field but rather the myriad of reminders off the field of the sexual assault scandal that was hung over the program and university for two years.

The night before the game, Baylor assistant coaches released a statement denying that fired head coach Art Briles failed to act after learning about a gang rape involving his players. Receiver Chris Platt sent a tweet that seemed to imply that Baylor's blackout on Saturday was a tribute to Briles -- which Platt and a university spokesperson later denied and credited to the rivalry with TCU. At a tailgate across the street from the stadium, a local store sold shirts with Briles' initials on the front, which Baylor fans lined up to purchase. There were reports that a police officer escorted out a TCU fan trying to take pictures of the shirts. And a banner with those same "CAB" initials hung from a luxury box inside McLane Stadium during the game.

The incidents sparked national outrage, including from sexual assault activist Brenda Tracy, who tweeted an apology to the Baylor survivors.

My apologies to @Baylor survivors. My heart is breaking for you. How dare these people mock your pain. Our pain. You are not alone. I love u https://t.co/zfLa9uRxll

Sunday in a statement to ESPN.com's Mark Schlabach, Tracy, who was gang-raped by four men, including two Oregon State football players, said that Baylor should cancel the rest of its football season following the "callous, cruel and vicious" actions of some Baylor fans.

"What I want is for Baylor to act like they have some institutional control and stop allowing the football program to re-victimize the already traumatized survivors," Tracy said in her statement to ESPN. "In a show of institutional courage, Harvard just canceled the rest of the men's soccer season over lewd ratings of female players. If Baylor wanted to do the right thing, they would cancel the rest of the football season for yesterday's display of deliberate and calculated cruelty."

Tracy spoke to the Baylor football team this summer and praised the team and interim head coach Jim Grobe for being attentive and taking the matter seriously. But in a column for the Huffington Post, Tracy revealed a member of the Baylor coaching staff angrily pulled her aside and said he did not understand why she was in Waco and that sexual assault was a campus problem, not a football one.

After the assistant coaches released their joint statement on Friday -- which they released without telling Grobe -- Tracy told ESPN that any denial that this was intentional falls flat in her opinion.

"It was all over social media," Tracy told ESPN. "Please don't try to say that you didn't know. Every single assistant coach that tweeted the night before in support of Art Briles knew what those black uniforms meant. ... The entire thing was INTENTIONAL.

"It was a deliberate slap in the face to the women who were assaulted and raped on Baylor's campus and for what? Art Briles? The man who said he knew of a gang rape and did nothing? Or the man who threw all of his assistant coaches under the bus by saying that he delegated down and didn't know what was happening on his team?"